Review

Desire and Phoebe Bridgers’ Garden Song

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BY ANANYA KUMAR-BANERJEE

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(February 26, 2020)

I’ve been fixating on gardens recently. Maybe this is because I live in an apartment, and I’ve been spending all my time inside. Maybe I’m thinking about gardens because they remind me of my childhood, when my family lived in a house with a backyard framed in the ferocious green of mid-Atlantic weeds. Maybe I’m thinking about gardens simply because, at the time of my writing, it’s spring. It’s the time of year when life reminds us that things are still moving forward, even if we think they aren’t.

Phoebe Bridgers’ Garden Song was released in late February of 2020 as a single. Shortly after, it became Bridgers’ most popular song, soaring ahead of Motion Sickness. After the release of the album Punisher, Garden Song was buried among a series of electric and sentimental songs. But Garden Song remains important for me. It is irrevocably linked in my memory to where I was at the beginning of the pandemic.

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Garden Song is a moody ballad. The introductory thrumming feels like it is made to be heard from inside a house, the sole sounds emptying into a room where one sits alone. It’s a song about the future. I started listening to the song in the beginning of March 2020, well before we knew things would be as they are now.

In the song, Bridgers’ narrator tells us she’s looking to the future, to a “someday”. She’s dreaming, reflecting on the possibilities of a particular imagined day. Bridgers pelts us with details: a house upon a hill, a skinhead neighbor, false flowers in bed, a fire in her youth. But the chorus is where it hits us. The chorus is where she reveals the emotions grounding the whole piece.

There, she reveals that she is looking at someone. This is the person she wants to share her “someday” with. She tells us this she wants a shared future. A future with a garden. Who knows if it will happen? Who knows how much will have been lost along the way?

There’s a certainty in that desire that is grounding, especially when life becomes loose at its hinges. Time becomes a detail. Instead, we are asked to look inward. Bridgers points us to an internal clock which is significantly less meticulous. It is type of time-keeping that has very little to do with regular rhythms. Garden Song begs the question: Do you know what you want? It doesn’t ask how long it will take to get there.

Wanting these days is a complicated feat for me. It’s naïve, it’s romantic, often, it’s pathetic. I can’t help but feel as if I’m experiencing a crisis of desire. This crisis feels reflected back at me in the media I consume. In the books I read, disaffected narrators state the facts of their life with no gesture towards their desires or the future. In the news I watch, we move away from the hopefuls towards the expected. Desire loses its currency in a world that is closing in on itself. The center, once firm, does not hold. But desire propels us forward. Strong desires are often indecipherable from needs.

Garden Song gives wanting a kind of value that is, for me, hard to overstate. To want something is to believe, however impossibly, that it might given to you. TWhen we desire something or someone, we implicitly say that we are willing to do something to get to the object of our desire. We admit that we have not given up. Desire is the antithesis of the resignation I find myself wearing as an everyday garment.

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Times between when I first started listening to Garden Song and now seems to have passed in one fluid stroke. Like Bridgers’ narrator, I don’t know how, but I got here. I’m here in my apartment in Connecticut, and it is spring. Every morning at 8, the birds hum their tune at a pace paralleled in Garden Song. Somehow, I lost winter along the way. The days are often sunny and brisk. The trees look courtly in their coral and blush plumes. 

Today, I saw the loose petals of a cherry blossom tree scatter in the wind. I was listening to Garden Song and thinking about how I wanted to share this memory with someone. Like Bridgers’, I don’t know what’s going to happen in the future. I don’t know if my parents and grandparent will make it to the end of this virus. I try to keep my eyes trained on the horizon, Bridgers’ invoking “someday”. I am trying to make space for wanting in my life because I can’t let myself give up. I look for the beauty provided by the earth’s movements.

I stay inside. I call my parents daily, sometimes multiple times a day. This is the closest I’ll be to them for months. I dig my hands into more books, into a fresh set of pencils and charcoals. I want to read. I want to draw. I want to see beauty in life’s edges. I want to, like Bridger, look up into the world and see a life worth living.

So, yes, I’ve been thinking about gardens, the kinds which are starting to flourish in New England every spring. Sometimes, I smell the fresh soil and grassy dew of gardens in my dreams. I see their colors outside my window, where the birds have been singing into the late morning hours. Gardens are the product of years of desire and hard work. They demand patience and investment. 

I’ve been thinking about the kind of person I want to be. What kind of world I want to grow into, what I want my garden to look like. Who I want to grow alongside. If you listen closely to the song, you can hear a second voice paired softly with Bridger’s at the chorus. A voice which amplifies her own. This voice is also thinking about the future, wondering how we got where we are. This voice is just trying to figure it out, too.

I’d like to think that someday, I’ll have a house with an herb patch that produces perfect pleats of hot peppers. I’m trying to focus on the small details without paying attention to the kinds of things that could hurt. I’m putting effort into imaging a future of gardening, where desire rules my life in an orderly fashion. I want to believe that there will be good things waiting for me and the people I love in a decade or two. I have to.

The life I live after this virus – if it might be said, however daringly, that there will be an after — will be one haunted by all that preceded it. It will be filled with the ghosts. So, I don’t flood my future with my mother’s face, my grandfather’s smile. I fill it with a sense of calm possibility, the very mood brilliantly echoing throughout Garden Song. I want big bay windows and sunlight that soaks in all the warm colors of my house. I want a family. I want to love many people. I want a life full with all its living. I tell myself that I know that I will get there.

Like Bridger’s declining, soft voice tells us at the end of the folksy tune: “No, I’m not afraid of hard work/And I did everything I want/I have everything I wanted.” Like Phoebe Bridgers, I concede to my desire, because I know it does something profound: it keeps me alive.

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Ananya Kumar-Banerjee is an MPhil Candidate for World Literatures in English and a recent graduate of Yale, where they studied Ethnicity, Race & Migration. Ananya is interested in the dynamic between speculative work and contemporary narratives around reality. They are a proponent of literary romance and local public radio. When they’re not reading, you can find them listening to love songs and playing with their tuxedo cats, Patchouli and Arlo.

[REVIEW] The Only Good Indians by Stephen Graham Jones

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Saga/Simon & Schuster, 2020

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REVIEW BY THEODORE C. VAN ALST, JR.

Gabe’s dad looks out the kitchen window, at the wall of the house right beside his, maybe.

Who knows what old men look at?

—Stephen Graham Jones, The Only Good Indians

When it comes to reading, anyway, what do we, old men or not, look at? The words we read, the images they evoke? Cover art, name, title?

Or ourselves, like the best art asks us to?

Stephen Graham Jones always asks, subtly demands, and ultimately forces us to engage with all of the above along with the not-so-casual why of why we read at all.

For scholars of Native lit (whatever that category may be, or ever have been), a new offering from Jones presents two possibilities, both usually inhabiting the horror category (and increasingly the genre). The first; what terrors await us as readers and teachers of his work that always pushes and stretches our intellectual abilities and classroom boundaries, the second; as Native scholars of lit, well, it’s only having to examine the boundaries of what we do and who we are.

Jones’s notoriously difficult and elastic experimental work in texts such as The Fast Red Road and The Bird is Gone: A Manifesto present their own academic challenges in the field, but his own essays and thoughts on being a writer (“Why I Write,” 7 Things I’ve Learned So Far,” “The H Word: What We Talk About When We Talk About Horror Endings”), and being a Native writer (e.g. the oft-cited multiply-published “Letter to a Just Starting-Out Indian Writer, and Maybe to Myself,” first heard at the Native American Literary Symposium in 2015) make us do the real work.

On one level, Jones’s latest, The Only Good Indians, makes a similar in structure but different in move via tone that I found in my first reading of Silko’s Ceremony. In the 1986 Penguin paperback version, the “Note on Bear People and Witches” appears on page 131, exactly halfway through the book. While I may have noted it as a postmodern turn at the moment, it was nonetheless the moment in which the text rolled from a self-conscious exercise in projected classroom teaching to the vibrant, layered storytelling masterpiece I hoped it would be. Though not quite at halftime, the moment in which The Only Good Indians moves from a story I found myself describing in a note as a work that “reads a thousand years old and not-born for even more, while it lives today with each next word. The first segment was a hundred grocery store paperbacks comfortable, that best voice to hear, so I should have known it wouldn’t, couldn’t last,” to an expectedly unexpected slow inferno in a Jones work is demarcated in post-postmodern (I’ll go with “neocosmic” [new world] for lack of a better term as to what debatable literary/theoretical moment we find ourselves currently inhabiting) fashion by the author himself: “It’s a line between who Lewis used to be and who he is now.”

It’s been a minute since Jones published anything with an identifiable “Indianness” in its title (of course in the week or so since I started writing this he’s published Attack of the 50 Foot Indian in typical Jones prodigious fashion), and though I am not making the argument that doing so now marks a departure from his commitments to “Indianness” everywhere and nowhere, The Only Good Indians marks a broad Big 5 (soon to be Big 4, I assume) release, and through no fault of the author picks up the requisite looking-for-an-Indian-in-this-cupboard mainstream boosts along the way. According to Saga Publishing, Jones is “The Jordan Peele of Horror Literature,” and in his latest, “The creeping horror of Joe Hill meets Tommy Orange’s There There in this dark novel of revenge told in Stephen’s unique voice.”

Puns and jokes sing throughout the work, from protagonist Lewis Clark to “The Last Finals Girl.” Jones gives Native folks some much-appreciated inside Crow jokes to go along with almost every Native kid’s school experience: “Is this really Indian, D? Shouldn’t you do something to honor your heritage?” (129). Challenges like that can unwittingly escalate to unmooredness, to the cultural vertigo Jones deals with in showing the shame and awkwardness of disconnectedness, telling us “Lewis never built the sweat he wanted, but if he stands in the upstairs shower long enough that it’s all steam, he can pretend, can’t he?” (105).The fear of ill-defined identity is as nerve-wracking as the inexorable approach of hulking monsters. The Only Good Indians examines the trauma of place, of leaving the reservation, and also how those who stayed behind are really never that far away.

The physical sense of immersion is equal to the mental depth provided by Jones. The deep cold of the northern plains and mountains is palpable, leaving us wanting a blanket against the chill as much as we want it to fight the terrors that waltz under the bluewhite iciness of black Montana nights. And when we think we couldn’t possible feel more alone under those clear hard stars, he switches to 2nd person narration for Elk Head Woman, leaving us utterly lost in the snow. This masterful melding of cultural specificity that translates to universal horror is the neocosmic approach of The Only Good Indians, a much-awaited offering which thoroughly delivers on Entertainment Weekly’s declaration that it’s “One of 2020’s Buzziest Horror Novels.”  It marks, intended or not, the departure of Jones into the broader mainstream, with, for the field of Native literature, a guideline over Jones’s always-generous shoulder, bringing so many of us along with him while reassuring the good doctor, as if he needed it, that we’re with him, still connected, looking forward to the worlds he’s heading into.

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THEODORE C. VAN ALST JR. is Associate Professor and Chair of Native American Studies at the University of Montana. He is a former Assistant Dean and Director of the Native American Cultural Center at Yale University, and has been an Assistant Professor and Co-Chair of the Program in Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies at the University of Connecticut. His most recent work includes “Lapin Noir: To Del Rio It Went” in A Critical Companion to the Fiction of Stephen Graham Jones, ed. Billy J. Stratton from the University of New Mexico Press as well as the chapters “Navajo Joe,” and “The Savage Innocents,” in Seeing Red—Hollywood’s Pixeled Skins: American Indians and Film (2013), available from Michigan State University Press. His current book-length project is Spaghetti and Sauerkraut with a Side of Frybread, and his edited volume The Faster Redder Road: The Best UnAmerican Stories of Stephen Graham Jones was released in April 2015 by the University of New Mexico Press, who are also publishing a collection of his short stories in 2018. His fiction and photography have been published in Entropy, The Rumpus, Indian Country Today, The Raven Chronicles, and Yellow Medicine Review, among others. He has worked as a consultant on multiple projects for the Disney Channel as well as on NPR’s All Things Considered, and has recently appeared in multiple segments of the History Channel series Mankind the Story of All of Us. He has been interviewed by The Washington Post, Canadian Broadcast Corporation, Native America Calling, Smithsonian Magazine, and Al-Jazeera America Television on a variety of subjects, from Native representation and Tonto to Spaghetti Westerns, headdresses, and Twilight.

[REVIEW] Animal Wife by Lara Ehrlich

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Red Hen Press, 2020

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REVIEW BY SHANNON PERRI

The cover of Lara Ehrlich’s debut short story collection, Animal Wife, might make you scream. On it, a quintessential 1950’s housewife, dressed in a frilly apron and with a bow in her meticulously curled hair, offers a look of shock on one side of her face, while the other half has transformed into a snarling wolf. The effect is jarring. The cover suggests that, inside of this domesticated woman, lives a wild and dangerous beast clawing for release.

The characters in Ehrlich’s collection battle a sense of entrapment, too. These dark, fairy tale-esque stories reckon with how a civilized world holds girls and women captive. Like wild animals locked in cages, the characters rage against their plight. They bare their teeth, only to have their captors saw them off. For instance, in “Night Terrors,” a girl wakes up with an ominous feeling that something terrible might happen to her or her family. She is taught to quell her fear, only to learn that her instincts were right. In “Kite,” a mother “feels alive like a soaring kite and ignores the pull from far below, as if someone were tugging the string.” But the pull is there, limiting and restricting her.

Though these fifteen stories vary in length and only some contain elements of magical realism, they all share an absurdist, allegorical, and feminist tone, similar to the works of Carmen Maria Machado and Kate Bernheimer. Many of the stories are told in the present tense, heightening the brooding suspense. One is not even confident that the characters will survive to the end of each page.

The first several stories in Animal Wife center on girls, many of whom struggle with the anxiety of not knowing what it is they don’t know. They wade into murky waters, unsure of what danger lurks beneath the surface, but certain that danger is there. The protagonists age as the book moves forward. In fact, the collection is bookended by two linked stories, “Animal Wife” and “Animal Wife: Revisited.” The title story is told from the perspective of a girl whose mother suddenly vanishes. Many gendered rules constrict this girl. Her father instructs her not to fidget, develop calluses, or make others feel uncomfortable. Yet her mother, a sad and restless homemaker, has taught her differently. The girl reflects:

“My mother said girls have to take care of themselves. That’s how we avoid turning into sea foam and falling down wells. That’s how we escape hunters and kings who chop and carve and snip and steal. That’s why I practice punching every afternoon.”

The girl is devastated her mother has disappeared, and though there are hints as to what happened, it is not until we read the final story, told from the point-of-view of the mother, that we fully grasp the choices made and the transformation that has occurred. Ehrlich reveals why the mother had to leave, as well as the painful consequences of her decision. We feel for both the daughter and mother. We sense their ache. It is this sort of complexity that makes these beautiful stories so haunting and evocative.

Throughout the collection, many of the characters rebel, though rarely without a hefty cost. Often, their freedom from the captivity they’ve known only leads them to another prison. In “Vanishing Point,” one of the strangest, yet most stunning stories in the collection, a newly single academic “needs a change she can’t come back from,” so she tries to transform herself into a deer. She eats grass, wears a deer suit, even tricks a buck into mounting her. Yet as the story goes on, she finds herself enslaved to a new master and committing acts of betrayal.

Another compelling and especially timely theme explored in Animal Wife is the weight of motherhood. With the pressures of a deadly, uncontrolled virus on the loose, mass financial stress, evaporating childcare, and escalating racial tensions, many women are bursting with what The New York Times deems “mom rage.” Though perhaps intensified by the current moment, Ehrlich reveals how this anger is nothing new. It is not that the mothers populating Animal Wife don’t love their children, it’s just that they love themselves, and the worlds they inhabit make it nearly impossible for both to be true. One story states:

“In the fairy tales, a stag eludes a prince, drawing him deeper and deeper into the forest. There, the prince finds a maiden: a swan princess, a sleeping beauty, a girl dressed as a beast with three dresses folded into nutshells. He finds her in a lake, or a hollow tree. Although he doesn’t threaten her outright, he rides a stallion and carries a bow or a gun. Often, there are dogs. He bears her back to his palace, assuming she yearns for domestication. She grieves her wildness, even as she bears the prince’s children, maybe even comes to love them.”

Despite the devastating entrapment so many of these characters endure, a sense of hope prowls these pages, too. These girls and women are mighty. They do not give up or accept their fates. They swim across monster-filled bodies of water. They attend emerging writers workshops after years of putting their families first. They construct cage-fighting alter egos who can crush skulls between their thighs.

It is no surprise that Animal Wife is the winner of the Red Hen Fiction Award. Through gorgeous, searing prose, Ehrlich has created a cast of unforgettable heroines who rail against the unfair societal expectations that confine them. By telling their stories with beauty, nuance, truth, and magic, she has finally set them free.   

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SHANNON PERRI holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Texas State University and a master’s degree in Social Work from the University of Texas. Her words have appeared in a variety of newspapers and literary magazines, such as Houston Chronicle, Austin American-Statesman, Texas Observer, Joyland Magazine, Fiddleblack, Literary Orphans, and fields magazine. Her short story, “Liquid Gold,” was a finalist for the 2019 Texas Observer Short Fiction contest; her story, “The Resurrection Act,” was awarded a 2016 Joyland Magazine Publisher’s Pick; and her story, “Orientation,” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She lives in South Austin with her husband, son, and menagerie of pets. Follow her on Twitter @Shannonperriii.

[REVIEW] In the Key of New York City: a memoir in essays by Rebecca McClanahan

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Red Hen Press, 2020

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REVIEW BY CATE HODOROWICZ

I’ve never lived in New York City, though I’ve always loved it from afar. Visits to friends in Brooklyn, a few work jaunts into Manhattan, a research trip one summer to the UN. The subway and sidewalks were always crowded, the department stores a wreck of frenzied humanity, and the streets in August reeked of garbage, sewage, sweat, relentless sunshine, and the peculiar humidity that rises from concrete. My young daughters once saw rats the size of large housecats running along the subway tracks, and in that same afternoon, they tasted Korean food for the first time, ran through rain puddles at Rockefeller Center, and asked the whys and hows of people who slept on park benches.

New York is a place of both/and if ever there was one. I’ve heard stories this March and April that suggest the same: emergency rooms overflow; not enough masks, gloves, or gowns for hospital workers; not enough respirators; not enough anything at the grocery store; friends and lovers and coworkers and strangers dying alone, alone, alone. Streets and shops closed down, people closed up in apartments. Yet at 7 pm, windows open and all the quarantined bang pots and pans to thank the front-line workers. When hospitals discharge a COVID patient, or when someone makes it off the respirator alive, music fills the hallways: Journey, The Beatles, Jay-Z, and Alicia Keys.

New York is the heart of the publishing industry, and this season—the rest of this year, really—is a terrible time to release a book: bookstores have closed except for online orders; authors can’t travel to promote their titles; it’s been said we’re heading into the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression. And some might say it’s an awful moment to publish a book about New York since this latest crisis will leave awful scars, and the New York in a book about bygone days will be unrecognizable, a place of the past. The book, those same critics might say, won’t do anything to help us come to terms with the New York of now.

I humbly disagree.

Rebecca McClanahan’s In the Key of New York City: A Memoir in Essays from Red Hen Press, offers a timeless portrait of New York’s contradictions, which is to say, it provides a salve to the upheaval of now and acts as a reminder of the city’s constancy throughout tribulations. The book hinges on what seems a familiar premise: a writer fulfills a dream when she moves to Manhattan in the late 1990s. But this story is different: the writer and her husband arrive in the city not as starry-eyed young adults, but as a middle-aged couple. They plan to stay for just two years, but they remain for eleven, only moving away when family needs require the change.

One might think McClanahan’s experience of New York is idyllic, or perhaps a deep love affair, given how long she stays. But it’s quite the opposite. McClanahan, “a long-married woman who spends her mornings with the Oxford English Dictionary, looking up words like squirrel,” chronicles the specific loneliness of living among millions on a tiny island. It’s not loneliness she enjoys: neighbors keep to themselves even as their most private sounds permeate the walls of McClanahan’s sublet; she and her husband struggle to find employment and friendship; and as a writer, her work keeps her mostly at home.

Perhaps because the glamor of youth has slipped from McClanahan, her narrator is reliable, reflective, and curious. As a result, this is a book without guile, conspicuous consumption, or name dropping. In the Key of New York City sings a song of loneliness that is also the song of middle age, a time when many of us realize that embracing seclusion, rather than fighting its pain, frees us to live more fully. McClanahan doesn’t come to this easily, however: “so be it—is [a phrase] I’ve never actually spoken aloud, but I’m trying to practice thinking it, in hopes of entering a state of acceptance about the daily and nightly occurrences that are out of my control. Which is to say, nearly everything.”

It takes years of struggle to combat her discomfort. In an effort to ease that grief, McClanahan notices the lives of those around her—she strikes up conversions with homeless people who live in the parks; she meditates on the lives of hospital workers and the working class. She revels in her next-door neighbor’s daily opera practice. Notices the sheen of pigeon feathers. Saves a squirrel in the days leading up to 9/11. McClanahan is quite aware of what she’s doing: “Even as my reasonable mind is having its say . . . my other self is leaving on its own journey.” Tenderness isn’t a word one usually associates with New York, but it’s because of this that McClanahan’s empathy resonates, even as the speaker is better with tenderness for others than tenderness for herself. In some ways, McClanahan’s speaker is like the city itself – engaged in a push-and-pull between a tough exterior and a soft inner core.

New York’s literary bones would appreciate this book’s structure, which mirrors McClanahan’s existence: larger, contemplative essays intersperse with brief, interstitial studies of people, moments, and objects, just as her long stretches alone are punctuated by walks in the park or rides on the subway. The first half of the book pulls the reader into a portrait of the city, but then come two deeply personal and painful essays—one about marriage, one about cancer—that wracked me more deeply than the two pieces about 9/11 and its wake. I wasn’t there when the towers fell; like most of the country, I watched from afar, stupefied and confused. I have, however, been deep into marriage trouble and a shattering health diagnosis and the honesty of those two essays brought me to tears this morning as I re-read them.

Personal reactions aside, the true physical and metaphorical center of the book, “Tears, Silence, Song,” unlocks the book’s preoccupation with music as a salve for pain. Yes, the kind of music that belongs to opera and Broadway, as well as McClanahan’s back story as a serious student of choral music, but also the music of words, which McClanahan plays to great effect throughout the book. In one of my favorites, “Sublet,” the cadence and sounds of prose become poetry:

“Enjoy for the moment, then let it go—the fiery carp, the brilliant day, the black-eyed children with the dimpled hands, the coins on the ginkgo trees swirling down, down. Our lives are sublets anyway, and too quickly gone at that. And what better place to live out our leases. Curb your dog, your dogma, love your neighbor, your neighbor’s dog. We’re at the peak of our lives. O Sole Wio [sic]. Catch and release.”

But McClanahan learns her most important lesson about music from a choral director in her childhood. When she sings a lament too sweetly, he tells her, “’The important thing to remember . . .  is that it is doloroso. Rachel is mourning. She is in pain. Don’t make it pretty.’”

This approach might be just the tonic New York needs. McClanahan’s essays make very little about any kind of hardship pretty. Instead, they give us the truth: the loneliness of sorrow is a shared condition. She asks,

“If we all voiced our deepest selves to one another, what would become of us? I imagine first a vibration, then a distant hum that approaches slowly, indistinctly, as each of our voices finds its pitch, its timbre, culminating in one unearthly, communal roar—all the world’s love, hate, terror, joy, and fear gather in momentum until our ancestors, sensing the vibration, rise from their graves and join in.”

Far be it from me to announce anything definitive about a place like New York that defies categories. But there is this: no matter where we live, we are all, in our own ways, students of loneliness and suffering. But we are also students of beauty and imagination. In the Key of New York City tells us that both songs, sung at the same time, define what it is to be human. To drag our hearts through yet another crisis. New York is just a foil, really. We’re all this lonely and alone. It’s just that we notice it more when we’re in a crowded place with no friends or family. Even so, McClanahan suggests, we can live well among strangers, in our imaginations, in the tiny sublets of our lives.

At the end of the years in her real sublet, McClanahan refuses to say Goodbye to all that. Now that New Yorkers are sequestered in their homes, terrified of the virus that has spread across its vast surfaces, there is an important strength in this book’s refusal to join the literary trend of abandoning New York, that dear glittering, lonely, cheek-by-jowl city. For if those who love it abandon it, who will be left to chronicle its glories and terrors?

In the Key of New York City was originally slated for May 1 publication; as I write this in early May, the world is full of uncertainty. No one is sure when or how we’ll be able to approach normalcy. Red Hen Press, the book’s publisher, delayed-release until September. By September, that month we remember as one of destruction, I hope fortune changes: that the city’s hospitals are less full and some life has returned to its avenues. I hope we all continue to beat those pots and pans until, as McClanahan says, the “ancestors … rise from their graves and join in.”

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CATE HODOROWICZ’S essays and reviews have appeared in The Georgia Review, Fourth Genre, River Teeth, The Gettysburg Review, The Rumpus,  Hippocampus, and elsewhere. Her work has earned a Pushcart Prize and notable mentions in Best American Essays.

[REVIEW] Later, My Life at the Edge of the World: A memoir of outliving AIDS and its shadows by Paul Lisicky

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Graywolf Press, 2020

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REVIEW BY DWAINE RIEVES

There are places we go to by choice and others where we simply wind up.  The far tip of Cape Cod is, in Paul Lisicky’s new memoir Later, one of those places where your presence may only seem a choice.  This captivating tale opens in the early 1990s, a time when the artists and writers in Provincetown, or “Town” as we come to know it, are constantly shadowed by AIDS.  It is AIDS and the risk of the disease that, once you’re in Town, seems the ultimate decider.  In the opening scene, we find a young writer arriving at the local arts center, his initial thoughts preoccupied with his family’s fears, especially his mother’s worry.  “She is afraid of my living among my kind, especially now that so many young men are dying of AIDS.  She is expecting me to die of AIDS.”  It seems one’s fate in Town is one with AIDS, and the choice to live here—even if only for a year or two as a developing writer—is no cause for celebration.

A major theme in the early literature of AIDS was urgency.  The poet Bill Becker titled his 1983 collection of poems An Immediate Desire to Survive.  Immediacy was a warning, lateness no poetic conclusion. The journalist Randy Shilts constructed And the Band Played On along a timeline that leaves one breathless, the need to do something about this situation far too critical for anyone to sit and ponder.  In Paul Monette’s memoir, Borrowed Time, the story races over only a few months.  From the 80s until the mid-90s, the years for gay men were summarized in body counts, time always too short, science always lagging.  Reflection, the ability to dwell in a place and contemplate this untimely world, was no unrushed option for a young gay man, that time-out simply inconceivable given the chase of the virus.

In Later, by contrast, we have a gift of time: a place for contemplation even as the shadow of AIDS still chases us.  Such is the magic of living among the artists trying to create an art of life itself “at the edge of the world.”  Lisicky writes, “Town moves on two tracks at once.”  There’s the typical forward time and also “lyric time, which has nothing to do with the clock.”  The residents of Town thrive on lyric time, this patchwork of images and actions they share with us in this luminous read.  “It’s time as enacted in a painting or a poem or a song.”  Lyric time is set up as the opponent of AIDS time.  Lyric time allows us to sit with ourselves and think, for “lyric time moves off to the side and stalls: lateral instead of linear.”  Lyric time in Later allows us to sit with the lives we’ve witnessed and will witness, including the lives within us.  We flit with the narrator from lover to lover because flitting is all that this brief world allows us.  We dwell with the one who seems to care.  He moves on, and another steps up from the shadows.  Or should, his arrival only a matter of time.  Time is the beautiful lover luxuriating in the heart of Later.

Later also carries us from the years when AIDS seems inevitable for many gay men to 2018, a time when the risk for AIDS can be profoundly lowered and the disease itself treated.  The narrative sweep in Later is linear, the inhabitants of Town faithful in trying to help the new arrivals find their own direction.  These new residents have, after all, chosen this place where time and risks constantly mirror the body’s urges.  Who we are, including our sexual nature, is a given, but where this nature might take us can be a choice.  In Town, life itself feels a choice, the shadows close but also understanding.

The forward push of Later allows for detours.  We are presented with the narrative in parcels, short sections that could be taken as patchy prose poems within each chapter with rich, challenging language.  The structure of such finely stitched sections may easily remind you of a quilt, a collection of carefully stitched life stories, people and legacies to contemplate, the risks and rewards in where we choose to live, love, and in our all-too truncated time, develop.  Not an AIDS quilt now in prose, not really.  More a comforter as people in Town might stitch it, more purpose than opinion.  In Later, we’re given the opportunity to feel deeply the places where we’ve been, the lives in which we now find ourselves, and the places where we must yet go.  Later gives us time to suffer and also create, a place to comfort ourselves in our choices.

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DWAINE RIEVES was born and raised in Monroe County, Mississippi. Following a career as a research pharmaceutical scientist and critical care physician, he completed an MA in writing from Johns Hopkins University. His poetry has won the Tupelo Press Prize for Poetry and the River Styx International Poetry Prize. His writing has appeared in The Washington Post, The Baltimore Sun, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Georgia Review and other publications. 

[REVIEW] The Black Ghost by Alex Segura & Monica Gallagher

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comiXology Originals (2019)

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REVIEW BY JOHN VERCHER

If you had told me that I was going to love a new comic that was Lisbeth Salander meets The Spirit; that was a dash of Dick Tracy, a smattering of Stumptown, and a sprinkle of Alias; that had elements of Eisner and Rucka, a little bit of Luna Brothers, and even a hint of George R.R. Martin? I’d have laughed in your face and told you that sounded like a derivative mess. And I’d have been dead wrong. You, of course, would have been talking about the fantastic series, Black Ghost, written by Alex Segura and Monica Gallagher.

Instead of some seasonless word-and-picture potato salad made up of disparate elements that don’t belong together (raisins, anyone?), this collaboration from two gifted comic book veterans feels more like a comfortable homemade recipe where all the ingredients come together—the influences from great writers and artists of the past and present blending perfectly. Instead of copying their inspirations, they pay homage to them while creating something wholly unique and original.

Black Ghost follows the travails of Lara Dominguez (a Latina heroine who’s the lead in her own title? Don’t mind if I do!), a reporter/teacher/vigilante on the come up. We’re dropped into her story in medias res—and she’s immediately kicking ass. The writing from the get-go is crisp and economical, abandoning the exposition and introducing us immediately to our heroine who’s got heart and snark to spare.

Lara has been obsessed with tracking down a vigilante dubbed The Black Ghost—a modern-day version of Eisner’s The Spirit—and that singular focus has brought her dangerously close to losing her job, as she’s passed up the stories her boss actually wants her to work on. Adding to her compulsion for the Ghost is an Anonymous-type entity, Lone, who contacts her through her computer, giving her clues about criminal goings-on where the Ghost might appear—or where she might have a chance to hone her burgeoning fighting skills.

Segura seamlessly infuses his noir roots into the story—simmering beneath this drama, Lara is dealing with the unsolved murder of her brother, Tomas, a community organizer in Miami. It is the motivation behind her drive to bring other criminals to justice—but his death also triggered the contact from Lone. She is not oblivious to the coincidence, and the mystery deepens.

Issue #1 takes a George R.R. Martin-esque turn on the final page—that’s right! Someone you thought was indispensable gets Red Wedding-ed (no spoilers here)! The savvy of Segura and Gallagher’s writing chops make the event feel natural and not done simply for shock value. It’s a compelling end to a riveting first issue that manages to give us an origin story without talking down to the reader.

Issue #2 is where things get a little darker and a little grittier where Lara is concerned. There’s nothing more compelling than a character in trouble, and, man, Lara is in some shit of her own making. The second chapter dives deeper into Lara’s internal torment, and how she quiets it—or attempts to—with booze and other people’s warm beds. The Bendis/Alias influence is apparent here, but unlike Jessica Jones, Lara is hindered by her reliance on alcohol, not enhanced by it. It becomes quite clear in this issue that it is a kryptonite she can’t resist—as much as we want her to.

While she clears the cobwebs, Lara discovers that the mugging she saved her student from in the last issue is more complicated than she first suspected—a lot more so. If only she had time to deal with that instead of clinging to the last threads of her job before she’s fired. Did I mention Lone is getting a bit more aggressive in his encouragement of her vigilante activities, and that’s she having an increasingly difficult time with Tomas’s death and what it might mean?

This is to say that if you think chapter two slows down for you to catch your breath—think again. While Lara’s story gets more textured and layered, it only adds to the emotional heft and propels the narrative instead of turning it into a slog.

This is to say nothing of the art of George Kambadais and the coloring by Ellie Wright. The cartoonish style recalls the art present in the Luna brothers’ works (The Sword, Ultra, Girls), while the bright primary colors harken back to the era of Dick Tracy. While these styles might seem out of place in a noir-influenced comic that doesn’t shy away from profanity and violence, Kambadais renders facial expressions, body language, and action in a way that, in combination with Segura and Gallagher’s script, conveys the gravitas in every scene.

If the first two issues are any indication, comic fans are in for one hell of a series. I can’t wait to see what this team does next.

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JOHN VERCHER is a writer currently living in the Philadelphia area with his wife and two sons. He holds a Bachelor’s in English from the University of Pittsburgh and an MFA in Creative Writing from the Mountainview Master of Fine Arts program. His fiction has appeared on Akashic Books’ Mondays are Murder and Fri-SciFi. and he is a contributing writer for Cognoscenti, the thoughts and opinions page of WBUR Boston. Two of his essays published there on race, identity, and parenting were picked up by NPR, and he has appeared on WBUR’s Weekend Edition. His non-fiction has also appeared in Entropy Magazine. You can find him on his website www.johnvercherauthor.com and on Twitter at @jverch75.

[REVIEW] The Book of X by Sarah Rose Etter

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Two Dollar Radio, 2019

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REVIEW BY GABINO IGLESIAS

Sarah Rose Etter’s The Book of X is a strangely poetic, heartfelt, dark, and wonderfully creepy exploration of womanhood dipped in surrealism and wrapped in a bizarre love story where physicality plays a central role. Packed with writing that inhabits the interstitial place between horror, literary fiction, science fiction, and dark fantasy, The Book of X is a unique narrative that pushes against the boundaries of the genres it draws from while simultaneously carving a new space for itself in contemporary fiction.

Cassie, like her mother before her, was born with her stomach twisted in the shape of a knot. Despite the deformity, she spends a somewhat normal childhood with her parents and older brother on the family meat farm. She usually stays home with mom while her father and brother go to the farm to rip chunks of flesh from the earth to sell at the market. When Cassie starts going to school, her life is sometimes disrupted by people who discover her physical abnormality. Cassie grows up and learns that finding a boyfriend and making friends are no easy tasks when your body is considered grotesque by most people. After surviving school, she leaves home and moves to the city where she finds a desk job. While living in the city, Cassie meets a few men, but it never works out. Meanwhile, the knot in her abdomen starts causing her pain and she begins to visit various doctors in hopes of finding a solution. The struggles with her body seem to be a physical manifestation of the struggles she is forced to face in her new life. Her boss is abusive, the city is depressing, and her family is far from perfect. The meat from the farm brings less money every day and her parents’ aging becomes obvious to her. Finally, her father dies and that sends her back home. Her return to the farm, an experimental surgery, and a new man who enters Cassie’s life under less than ideal circumstances force her to reconsider her life as she learns to enjoy imperfect love and comes to terms with her identity and body. 

Etter created a unique world in The Book of X. Most of the narrative deals with everyday events like going to school, going to work, financial woes, a rough mother, and coping with rejection and depression. On the other hand, the story is infused with surreal elements?a store that sells men, meat farming, strange medical procedures?that somehow make perfect sense within the context of the story. Reality and weirdness inhabit the same spaces effortlessly and without clashing against each other. The result is a novel with a gloomy, depressive core that is also somehow hauntingly beautiful and wildly entertaining in its strangeness.

While this novel is unique and Etter’s voice is entirely her own, there were passages that reminded me of a variety of works, all of which are among my favorites. For example, the combination of sadness and strangeness brought to mind the novels of Alejandro Jodorowsky. Also, the book features short chapters made up entirely of dark imagery, strange visions, and nightmares that haunt Cassie. These passages are strong enough to cause discomfort in the reader. Also, they reminded me of the bizarre sense of discomfort and fascination I always feel while watching Begotten, an American experimental film written, produced, edited, and directed by E. Elias Merhige that has no dialogue and is entirely made up of dark, gruesome, religious, disturbing imagery:  

“He opens the lid wider. More light creeps into the box, and I can see bodies slithering beneath the water, slick, scaled. Suddenly, a small face comes into view beneath the surface: two eyes, strange nose, a mouth.”

While the darkness that permeates The Book of X is one of its most powerful elements, the narrative is also infused with poetry that comes at the reader unexpectedly, kind of like finding a gem while looking for lost papers in a dumpster. That said, the poetry is also imbued with an unrelenting melancholy that crawls into your chest and refuses to let go, settling between your ribs and camping out for a few days: 

“My throat is so full of love and sorrow that no more words come out. I can’t breathe and I know nothing, looking into the heart of the future, the relentless oncoming of death.”

Etter is a talented storyteller and The Book of X is proof of that. This is a book that is many things at once. On the surface, it is a narrative that explores a disfigured woman’s life and how cruelty and adverse reactions to those who are different are at the core of humanity. However, just under the surface, it is a sorrowful story about a lonely woman whose biggest wishes are to achieve some degree of normalcy in a world that has shown her how ugly normal can be and a look at the ways in which our nature as social animals drives us to relentlessly pursue companionship even when doing so repeatedly leads to suffering and rejection.

“In the afternoon, I read a book on the couch. I can barely catch the sentences, I can only imagine Henry’s lips, the history of the entire world in a kiss various genealogies of flowers blooming each time our mouths touched, how first I smelled lilac, then rose, then hyacinth, wet from the garden.”

The Book of X shines because it brilliantly enters into multiple conversations with various genres and shows how writers can use elements from whichever genre they please while respecting the rules of none of them. Etter’s many conversations, and the way she creates something entirely new, effortlessly bridge the gap between bizarro fiction, surrealism, horror, literary fiction, and noir without ever adopting any of their limitations. Furthermore, all of it happens while she creates a delightful dark and brutally honest narrative that shows what it means to be a woman in the world and that explores the ways in which what we are is brutally and/or tenderly shaped by the way others perceive us. In a way, this is a book created to expand the canon of what can be considered feminist literature, but it is also a celebration of storytelling that proves making up your own rules is sometimes the best way to create something unique and memorable.   

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GABINO IGLESIAS is a writer, journalist and book reviewer living in Austin, Texas. He is the author of Zero Saints and Coyote Songs. He is the book review editor for PANK Magazine and a columnist at LitReactor. You can find him on Twitter at @Gabino_Iglesias.

[REVIEW] Pretend We Live Here by Genevieve Hudson

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Future Tense Books, 2018

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REVIEW BY KAIT HEACOCK

As the Pacific Northwest editor for Joyland—a magazine founded on the idea that fiction is an international movement supported by local communities—I’m tasked with determining what makes PNW literature. Through Joyland, I had the pleasure of meeting Genevieve Hudson, author of the story collection Pretend We Live Here (Future Tense Books, 2018). I’ve carried the book with me through two moves, and many of its stories have stuck with me like they are my own memories of childhood heartbreak, adult heartbreak, and all the inside jokes that help you laugh through those aforementioned heartbreaks.

When I consider Pacific Northwest literature—looking beyond the physical boundaries of the Pacific Ocean and the Cascades—I search for the stylistic choices and thematic concerns that connect writers of this area. First, I must consider some of our historically iconic authors: Ken Kesey, Oregon’s merry prankster of hippie lit, and Tom Robbins, whose novels are like the West in book form, boundary-pushing pioneers of prose. What connects these authors is their playfulness, even in the face of tragic plots.

But to sum up who we are as writers that way doesn’t feel complete. There’s more, and it’s something sacred. Where our books may laugh in the face of God (Oregon and Washington are part of the “Unchurched Belt”), we do show absolute reverence for nature. Cheryl Strayed hikes the PCT to enlightenment and Lidia Yuknavitch continues to find new ways to transform bodies into oceans. Many of us may lack religion, but we have no shortage of spirituality.

Our literature exists in this intersection between the irreverent and the reverent, and that’s where I found Genevieve Hudson. She came to me by way of the short story “Too Much is Never Enough” about a young protagonist with two best friends, a boy and a girl she loves in different ways, but who are confused by or disinterested in her love. The main character first meets Catherine Elizabeth, her inseparable childhood best friend she calls Lizard until the girl’s mom stumbles in on them while they are making their vaginas “fart.” It’s a funny scene of kids innocently discovering the absurdities of having a body, but it quickly darkens when the mom, confused by the tomboyish best friend, enrolls her daughter into ballet classes and effectively ends the friendship.

Next, the girl befriends Mason, a rabble-rousing boy introduced holding a homemade bomb. “Mason looked like an angel, which was lucky for him because he acted like the devil so the two just about evened themselves out.” With Mason, she smokes stolen cigarettes and arm wrestles. As her body matures past childhood lines, she finds herself wanting to be him and to be loved by him. But instead, Mason finds Lizard, now Katie: “There was something they found in each other they could never find in me. I was not enough boy for Lizard. Not enough girl for Mason. I was something in between them.”

In between is where Genevieve’s stories live: characters in-between identities, settings in between Alabama and Amsterdam, a tone in between hilarious and heartbreaking. Her writing lives in a fluid space between a funny anecdote someone told you about their rural childhood and your third eye’s fever dream.

“Too Much is Never Enough” is not the only story of a tomboy figuring out how she fits in at the skatepark and punk shows where teens constellate in Pretend We Live Here. In “Scarecrow,” it’s Crow filming her best friend Jed and his fearless little brother on her camcorder while the boys perform daredevil stunts. In “Skatepark,” the protagonist is the only girl who skateboards besides the boys, and one of only two “12-year-olds who were brave enough to drop-in on the 12-foot half-pipe.” These stories are ripe with young girls who run from Sunday school dresses and refuse to stand on the sidelines while the boys have all the fun. Instead, they run towards their best friends’ older sisters, and they are wild with rebellion and first love. “She takes off at a slow pace for the show. It’s the kind of night with the day still in it…She stops and rips a sprig of lavender from a bush. She rubs it over her face and arms, shoves it inside her training bra.”

In many of these stories, the tomboy experiences a loss of innocence: a confusing sexual encounter she immediately regrets, following a reckless crush, watching her best friend sacrifice a piece of himself for the love of an estranged parent. These stories end with each character’s sudden jolt into adulthood. It’s as if the characters in these stories grow up and become the jaded, sarcastic, but occasionally still optimistic adults of the collection’s other stories.

The title of the collection is a line pulled from the story “Date Book,” in which the protagonist recounts a year with her long-distance girlfriend in short blurbs for each month. “By September you are another country again. The thought of you causes me to pick weeds, to put poems on the back of receipt paper. I get a package in the mail. It’s wrapped in a map of the place where you live. I fall in love with the smell of the cardboard, the image of your palms folding the top down. We meet on an island in the middle. I feed myself to you until we’re full.” The months are carefully and lovingly filled with acutely personal details, so that when January gets only the solemn entry “January,” the reader knows the end is near. “In February we go to Seattle to say goodbye. We accidentally rent a weekend apartment over a lesbian bar. We laugh all the way up the stairs.” It the end of their story, but they are pretending together. “We pretend we live here. We drink from cups. We unmake the bed.”

As the title of the collection, Pretend We Live Here sounds more like a command. It seems again to point to the in-between space this book evokes for me. There’s an implication of transience in the title, which is true for many people who come west. The Pacific Northwest, as the farthest point of the Contiguous United States, is often where people end up, particularly now as an influx of workers come here for tech jobs. Hudson is herself a transplant to Portland from Alabama, and her stories draw from all of her real-life settings. Whether the stories are set in a small town in Alabama or the queer art scene in Amsterdam, the characters within them are searching for something.

The first story in the book, “God Hospital,” and the last, “Boy Box,” both end with the protagonist being led away from a place. In each, the young girl follows an older girl, who acts as a guide, either away from or, potentially, to danger. The characters in the collection, children figuring out gender fluidity and first crushes or adults navigating complicated relationships, are seeking guides, but the guides—and Hudson—rarely take the reader to expected places.

Don’t try to pin Genevieve Hudson down. She will keep you guessing, and goddamn that’s something I adore in a writer. She has taken up the mantle of Robbins, Kesey and the other psychedelic, blue-collar poets of evergreens, mountain streams, and witty one-liners, and is queering the canon of Pacific Northwest literature.

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KAIT HEACOCK is a writer and book publicist whose work centers the lives of women and non-binary folks, particularly those in the queer community. Her shorter work can be read in literary places from Joyland to The Millions, infrequent reviews for the Women’s Review of Books, and in her debut short story collection Siblings and Other Disappointments. Her work has received support from the Montez Press summer residency at Mathew Gallery and been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She is currently at work on a novel about what happens when women turn their anger outward.

[REVIEW] The Last Innocence/The Lost Adventures by Alejandra Pizarnik, Trans. Cecilia Rossi

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(Ugly Duckling Presse, 2019)

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REVIEW BY CLARA B. JONES

 

SOMETHING

night as you go

lend me your hand

work of a teeming angel

days commit suicide

why do they?

night as you go

good night

Alejandra Pizarnik

 

Ugly Duckling Press sponsors a Lost Literature Series that “publishes neglected, never-before-translated, or scarcely available works of poetry and prose.” Painter and writer, Alejandra Pizarnik (1936 -1972), is among the avant-garde writers highlighted—a daughter of Russian Jewish immigrants to Argentina who died from an overdose of Seconal while on furlough from a mental institution. Most of the online and textual sources that I consulted label her death, “suicide.” It is well-documented that Pizarnik endured challenges growing up, particularly problems affecting her physical appearance (acne, weight gain) and social presence (stuttering). However, she coped sufficiently during some periods as a young adult, living and studying in Paris for four years and traveling widely on Guggenheim and Fulbright awards. I first became familiar with Pizarnic when conducting research on Marosa di Giorgio, another South American poet resurrected in Ugly Duckling Press’ recovery project. Marjorie Agosín’s edited volume* provided useful “portraits of Latin American women writers,” documenting that, of the sixteen included in the book, six died tragically—among these, four poets who died by suicide.

The Last Innocence/The Lost Adventure comprises two poetry collections, published 1956 and 1958, respectively, of mostly short pieces revealing Pizarnik’s self-absorption and dark mien, presented in styles that are difficult to classify, though she is generally placed among the literary Surrealists (unconscious motivation, dream analysis), with a current of Romanticism (inner world, feelings, emotions). Like her noteworthy visual art, however, Pizarnik’s poetry demonstrates an affinity to Expressionism’s emphasis upon emotion, exaggeration, anti-realism, and psychological reality. It was also an important movement in the fine arts in Argentina during the 1960s, according to Edward Lucie-Smith (Thames & Hudson, 2004). It is not clear to me why Pizarnik switched from literary studies to painting and then to writing; however, an online source suggested that she considered one of her teachers—“pre-Surrealist” Giorgio de Chirico— to be a poor artist, and therefore possibly a source of disillusionment for the young student.

Argentina has the highest per capita number of psychoanalysts in the world, and one online report is titled, “Almost everyone in Buenos Aires is in therapy.” In addition, Argentina has high rates of depression and suicide. Pizarnik wrote in this psychosocial milieu, combined with a political context characterized by authoritarianism and military dictatorship. Although Pizarnik was a lesbian (or more probably bisexual) the scholar David William Foster pointed out that, “Her poems reveal only scant same-sex markers,” a characteristic that Foster attributed to the need to remain conventional under repressive regimes. On the other hand, a 2015 article by journalist and editor Emily Cooke demonstrates that, in letters to her analyst, León Ostrov, to whom The Last Innocence is dedicated, Pizarnik spoke openly, even flirtatiously, about her sexual attractions and fantasies (especially in Letter #10 dated 12/27/1960) and that she was consciously aware that she (and, he?) had entered the Freudian stage of “transference,” where unconscious sexual motivations transfer from patient to therapist and vice versa.

Indeed, the letters discussed by Cooke suggest to me that Pizarnik’s correspondence to Ostrov may have been manipulative, though, to what end? The letters leave the impression of a playful girl, and Enrique Vila-Matas, writing in Lit Hub in 2016, states, “The dark force of her Immaturity produces an irresistible attraction,” different from today’s “academic lyric poetry.” Pizarnik had a history of rebelling against the academic establishment, a characteristic that she shared with the Expressionists. But The Last Innocence/The Lost Adventures, collections written before her residence in Paris (1960-1964), has more affinities to Surrealism as compositions representing the poet’s unconscious psychological states of being and deep motivational drives (e.g., epigraph poem).

Vila-Matas refers to Pizarnik’s story as “an unstoppable myth,” and much has been written about the themes of childhood, not-belonging, woman-as-hostage, and silence in her oeuvre. In 2006, scholar Susana Chávez-Silverman referred to the poet’s “complex textual self” expressed in “a variety of…voices”—dolls, little girls, “automata,” animals, the wind, etc. Pizarnik’s writing has often been compared to that of Silvina Ocampo, Emily Dickinson, and Sylvia Plath—Ocampo because of the tendency to “decouple emotion and action”: “…a dead bird / is flying toward despair / in the midst of music / when witches and flowers / cut the hand of the mist. / A dead bird called blue.” (49); the other two poets because of an emphasis upon death, dying, and interiority: “…there is something that tears the skin, / a blind fury / running through my veins.” (21).

In a 2019 Bookforum article, Cooke discussed Plath’s letters to her (female) therapist, showing the poet to be supplicatory, demanding, desperate for attention and aid, and, in the words of poet Vijay Seshardri, “psychologically sensitive.” While Pizarnik’s letters to Ostrov are clearly attention-seeking and, possibly, unconscious cris de coeur, she performs her writing with vigor and feigned or exaggerated self-confidence rather than Plath-like neurasthenia. Nonetheless, some psychologists speak of the “Sylvia Plath effect”—the purported association between creativity and mental illness. Indeed, following an American Psychological Association article, Aristotle wrote “that eminent philosophers, politicians, poets, and artists all have tendencies toward ‘melancholia.’” It is a simple point to observe that Pizarnik’s persona is consistent with the Plath effect; however, unless I am mistaken, the validity of the hypothesis is controversial among psychologists and feminists—open to interpretation, gendered, and lacking hard evidence.

In a recent New Yorker interview between editor Kevin Young and Seshadri, Plath was discussed in terms of several traits, some applying readily to Pizarnik. For example, in contrast to the classicism of Elizabeth Bishop, Seshadri pointed out that Plath’s writing is “absolutely individuated—it’s very hard to see Plath as an exemplar of anything but her own situation and condition.” One might consider this characteristic to be an artistic limitation; however, both Plath and Pizarnik have proven to have lasting popularity, particularly among women and the young, raising issues of “gendered and sexualized” self/ other contrasts as well as spectors of “power and powerlessness,” topics discussed in numerous scholarly and critical papers available online. Seshadri goes on to point out that both Bishop and Plath wrote poetry that communicates “wildness” and animality, also features of Pizarnik’s writing as noted above.

To speak of self/other raises questions about “alterity,” a topic fundamental to the Lacanian psychoanalytical traditions in Argentina. For Lacan, the Other is the subject—symbolically and metaphorically, and the role of the Other is to mediate its relation to the unique, “individuated” subject in a dialectical manner. Thus, Pizarnik’s “you” may be understood to be herself: “this dismal obsession with living / this distant madness of living / it’s dragging you down alejandra don’t deny it” (17), suggesting a circular, internal, “individuated” relationship of the poet to the environment that is, presumably, unconscious– “I must go / but on you go, traveller!”(25). Perhaps this characterization of Plath and Pizarnik relies too heavily upon a conceptual framework implying narcissism; however, more than one scholar has interpreted Pizarnik’s self-absorption in this manner (see, for example, Stephen Gregory, 1997, Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, vol. 74). To speak of self/other or subject/object incorporates another of Lacan’s essential ideas—“mirroring.” the process of objectifying the Ego, typifying “an essential libidinal relationship with the body-image”: “alejandra alejandra / beneath I am me / alejandra” (29). Pizarnik entered psychoanalysis at a relatively young age, demonstrating a precocious grasp of its canon in letters to Ostrov; thus, authentic and accurate critical scrutiny of her oeuvre must include evaluations of Lacanian psychoanalysis on her state of mind, behavior, socio-economic-political contexts, values, attitudes, opinions, and writing.

Vijay Seshadri noted that Plath’s poems are “not just held together by form.” Similarly, Pizarnik’s compositions rely not only upon innovative uses of lineation, punctuation, and other grammatical conventions, but also upon complex semantic, imagistic, and musical features transmitting powerful emotional content open to multiple interpretations, including possibilities for identification—no doubt major determinants of Pizarnik’s appeal and endurance, particularly for women and young adults. Cecilia Rossi’s sensitive translations will widen Pizarnik’s readership and contribute to the increasingly common recovery projects of female writers and visual artists forgotten, lost, passed over, overpowered, or dismissed. Too many of these women lived or died tragically; the least we can do is to honor their work.

 

*Borinsky Alicia. Alejandra Pizarnik: the self and its impossible landscapes. pp 291-302 in Marjorie Agosín, Ed. A dream of light & shadow: portraits of Latin American women writers. (1995) University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque.

 

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Clara B. Jones is a knowledge worker practicing in Silver Spring, MD, USA. Among other works, she is the author of Poems for Rachel Dolezal (Gauss PDF, 2019). Clara also conducts research on experimental literature and art & technology.

[REVIEW] Bloomland by John Englehardt

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(Dzanc, 2019)

REVIEW BY DAVID TROMBLAY

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Bloomland, the winner of the 2018 Dzanc Prize for Fiction, explores the cyclic American cultural phenomenon of an all too real mass shooting set at a fictionalized southern university nestled in an evangelical stronghold where God and guns are routinely spoken of in the same breath and with the same reverence. Though the setting is masterfully crafted and given intimate nuance by Englehardt, Bloomland could also have the thinnest veil dragged across its pages and become Anytown, USA, all too easily unnervingly. Therein lies the first of countless gripping details waiting between the novel’s pages. Englehardt strikes at the unfortunately understood universality of this story by whispering to the psyche of the reader, saying, “this is what real endings look like, after anxiety erodes into routine.

This conversation—which has spent too much time in the mouths of talking heads following the week’s latest and greatest presumably unavoidable tragedy—is examined through the unfolding lives of a trio of characters including a student struggling to find a life of which they are willing to subscribe to, a widowed professor, and young man who is made listless by an emptiness and unknown yearning which he sets out to eradicate at any cost. The cost is interrogated by a trinity of narrators who attempt to talk the three characters through the descriptive, prescriptive, and speculative, events that led up to, unraveled during, and followed that fateful day.

“Later I understand you’re opening up to me, telling the story of your life like it happened to someone else, like the things you’ve experienced are not singular, but part of a cycle that is always repeating and reinventing itself.”

Englehardt employs these second-person narrators expertly while reminding the reader there is an “I” behind the tragedy to help usher the survivors who are left alive to move on afterward. Not doing so would be a grave mistake and no different than what America has been inundated with by the media following the endless string of mass shootings of recent history. By leading the reader through these knotted lives while using the “you” and “I,” Englehardt presents the question of who are “we” to sit back so apathetically and serve as an audience to what is quickly becoming history’s most grotesque spectator sport, leaving you to “…wonder if the scariest thing about all this is not that life can’t return to normal, but that it already has.”

It should not surprise readers that this book does not end with a cheery conclusion, but envelopes a meticulously scaffolded reflection of the current American society, one so willing to send thoughts and prayers when the time arises, yet simultaneously waiting for it to be their own turn, as if it is merely inevitable.

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DAVID TROMBLAY is a native of Duluth, Minnesota. He served for 10 years in the U.S. Navy, deploying to Iraq, Eastern Europe, and Africa. He is currently studying English Literature and Writing at the University of Wisconsin-Superior. His essays and short stories have appeared in Minerva Zine, The Nemadji Review, and Yellow Medicine Review. His first novel, The Ramblings of a Revenant, was published in 2015.